"New York might be a city of neighborhoods, but Nychaland is a zone of
its own. It is almost unthinkably huge: 334 “developments” spread from
Staten Island’s Berry Houses to Throgs Neck in the Bronx—178,895
apartments in 2,602 buildings situated on an aggregate 2,486 acres, an
area three times the size of Central Park. The population of Nychaland
is usually cited at 400,000, but this number is universally regarded as
too low, since most everyone knows someone living “off lease.” One NYCHA
employee says that “600,000 is more like it.” That’s about 8 percent of
New York—with 160,000 families on the waiting list. If Nychaland was a
city unto itself, it would be the 21st most populous in the U.S., bigger
than Boston or Seattle, twice the size of Cincinnati.

Indeed, perhaps Nychaland’s most compelling attribute is the fact that
it exists at all. Across the U.S., public housing, condemned as a
tax-draining vector of institutionalized mayhem and poverty,
whipping-boy symbol of supposedly foolhardy urban policy, has largely
disappeared. Chicago knocked down Cabrini-Green, St. Louis imploded
Pruitt-Igoe, New Orleans flattened Lafitte after Katrina. Only in New
York does public housing remain on a large scale, remnants of the days
when the developments were considered a bulwark of social liberalism, a
way to move up. "